Gordon Conway

Sir Gordon Conway

"Gordon Conway was appointed Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for International Development at the beginning of 2005. He also holds the title of Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London. Prior to that he was President of The Rockefeller Foundation from 1998-2004 and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex and Chair of the Institute for Development Studies from 1992-1998.

"He was educated at the Universities of Wales (Bangor), Cambridge, Trinidad and California (Davis). His discipline is agricultural ecology. In the early 1960's, working in Sabah, North Borneo, he became one of the pioneers of sustainable agriculture.  From 1970-1986, he was Professor of Environmental Technology at Imperial College, London.  During this period he lived and worked in many countries in Asia and the Middle East. He then directed the sustainable agriculture program of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London before becoming Representative of the Ford Foundation in New Delhi from 1988-1992."

Gordon Conway "is, by background, an applied ecologist. By profession, however, he is a pragmatist, a philanthropist, but, above all, an optimist. He lives and works on the upside of things. Not for him the headlines of the past few weeks, with doom everywhere. If the climate change don't get you, the avian flu must. The world, he insists, has got better and will get better still.

""I've been in the development business all my adult life," says Conway, who joined the government's Department for International Development (DFID) as its chief scientific adviser in January. "I went to Borneo in 1960 and and I've seen countries like that transform themselves. I first went to Indonesia in 1968, just after the enormous uprising and the slaughter. It was a terrible place then. You go there now and it's got to the point now that the DFID won't be funding it because it sees Indonesia as a middle-income country. I've also worked a lot in Thailand and I've seen that country transform over time. But you've got to talk in terms of 10 to 20 years for a country to really progress."

"His job description in his last post, as president of the Rockefeller Foundation, the US-based philanthropic giant that seeks solutions to global poverty? Something not often seen in the classifieds: "The wellbeing of humanity throughout the world.""


 * President, Royal Geographical Society
 * Advisory Council, World Food Prize
 * Advisory Board, Renaissance Weekend
 * Member, China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development